J.J. Cale (Gotta Get Back to You, Magnolia)

Last week the great J.J. Cale, beloved by talents ranging from Eric Clapton to Neil Young to Widespread Panic, left our realm. But he'll never be forgotten, for "Around Midnight" and "Cocaine" and many other great songs.

As a thoughtful obit in the Daily Beast pointed out, J.J. Cale songs don't seem to have been written — they seem always to have been there, like the blues themselves.

Here's my personal fav J.J. Cale song:

And a really warm obit in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, written by former columnist Steve Chawkins, concluded with this anecdote about the notoriously shy Cale:

Escondido city fathers tried to contact him, but in a 2009 Times interview Cale said he put them off as long as he could.
"They wanted me to talk to the chamber of commerce," he recalled. "And I said, you know, I'm not a chamber-of-commerce kind of guy."